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Martin Blaser, professor of medicine and microbiology at New York University

Obesity, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease. Asthma, allergies, celiac disease. Have you ever wondered why their incidence is on the rise? Let’s consider obesity for a moment. In 1990, one in ten adults in the United States was overweight. Nowadays, that number has risen to one in three, and one in ten adults is obese. According to the World Health Organisation, the problem affects people worldwide, including those in underdeveloped countries, so fat-rich diets and increased food intake cannot be the only explanation.

Then why are we getting fatter?

Martin Blaser, professor of medicine and microbiology at New York University, has a theory. He believes that some of our modern medical practices are to blame. The main culprit? Antibiotics – or rather, the way we have abused these antibacterial drugs over the last 70 years. Each one of us hosts a collection of good bacteria, known as the microbiome, that keep us healthy by training our immune system, helping us digest food and making essential vitamins for us. But every time we take an antibiotic, we destroy some of our friendly microbes and perturb this useful alliance, with negative consequences for our health.

Who would have guessed that the same ‘miracle drugs’ that cure us from horrible, deadly infections would – in some ways – make us sicker?

In 2014, Martin Blaser wrote a book entitled “Missing Microbes”, an urgent call to action to stop damaging our precious microbes before it is too late. Martin Blaser visited Stockholm last year to celebrate the release of the Swedish translation of his book. On that occasion, he met our intern Federica Santoro to chat about our bacterial allies and how antibiotic abuse is damaging our health in ways we could never have imagined.